Although I have been a lazy blogger lately we haven't been lazy working on our remaining tasks at all. So, unsurprisingly, since my previous post we have reached and passed a few nice milestones. The latest one is that we're finally able to build the gcc2/gcc4 hybrid Haiku images again, including all the software needed for the official release.

While that in itself isn't a particularly impressive feat - after all we were already able to build the complete gcc 2 part before - the interesting aspect is how we are doing it.

In regards to an office suite, I started thinking about this not too long ago. We have "StyledEdit", which saves to RTF (open standard, Microsoft Word compatible). It might not be too hard to add image support, and then table support, and so on...

But then I came to a part where I got stuck: I think (this is just a guess) what people really are asking when they ask for an office suite is "Microsoft Office compatibility". It doesn't matter if it can do everything that Microsoft Office can if it can't open the file formats.

So then I briefly looked into libraries that can read / write Office formats. There's one very basic one (includes an API and command line tool) but is not nearly feature complete enough. It looks like the LibreOffice library is "part of" the suite, so if that was going to be used it would have to be used with LibreOffice.

Tricky. :/ Maybe the best course of action would be a native port of the LibreOffice GUI...